Rachel Kornak

Both classes were very practical and utilized many best practices in distance education.  I was impressed by their format - short lecture videos (typically 5-10 minutes each) followed by mini-exercises in which you apply the concepts to your own company.  I used the e-magazine I created (www.geopivot.org) to complete the exercises.  

As part of the program, I created social media and traditional marketing plans, identified my target audiences and potential partners, learned how to optimize my website to encourage word-of-mouth advertising, selected a set of metrics to track my progress, designed a dashboard to easily visualize data trends, and created contingency plans for undesirable scenarios.

I enjoyed the classes so much, I'm considering completing six more to earn the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Professional Certificate.  I'm particularly interested in the classes below:

• The Power of Stories to Fuel Innovation
• Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Negotiation: How to Get (More of) What You Want
• Financing Innovation: Valuing Projects and Firms
• Building Business Models

The center itself is housed in an old school building along with several non-profit agencies.  Finding the center involved wandering down eerie, abandoned hallways lined with metal lockers.  Things started to look up once I found the right room.   A nice woman welcomed me and escorted me over to the workstation slated for grant research, where she gave me a quick tutorial on how to use the Foundation Center database.

The most entertaining part of the experience was the ancient computer, reminiscent of the one I used in middle school in the mid-90s.  The version of Internet Explorer was so outdated, Google couldn't open my email and warned me that I needed to "upgade to a modern browser" to gain functionality.

I stared my search by using two filters - geographic focus and field of interest.  The filters allow you to select from pre-populated lists of states and broad topics like "education."  Unfortunately, there weren't categories for "computers," "high-tech," or "mapping,"  which better describe the project I want to fund.

I found ~ 850 potential foundations using the first set of filters:

• Cancer + California or International = 158 Foundations 
  
• Higher Education + California = 618 Foundations
• Public Health, Environmental Health, Public Education + California or International = 80 Foundations

I skimmed the vast list of search results and found 24 foundations worth a closer look.  I was able to email detailed reports of these foundations to myself (after I upgraded the browser).  The most interesting foundations I found were the Dr. Seuss Foundation and the Association of American Geographers (AAG), a professional association I'm a member of.    I didn't realize AAG awarded almost a half million dollars in grants in 2011!

I reviewed the Foundation Center reports for 24 foundations, and ranked them based on alignment with subject area, geographic preference, type of financial need, typical dollar range of awards, personal relationships, and past history of giving to my organization.

Using the final set of filters, I created a list of 6 candidate foundations that match the following criteria:

1. Subject Area: academic research, skin cancer prevention, public education
   
2. Geographic Preference: southern California
3. Financing Type: research projects
4. Dollar Range: $50 - 200K
5. Foundation has funded universities in southern California or similar projects in the past.

As promised, I dove back into school today and began the first assignment in my UCLA class, "Successful Grant Proposals."  The goals of the first assignment were to choose a topic and identify several potential funding sources using The Foundation Center website.  

That seemed easy enough.  I already had a topic - modeling global ultra-violet radiation exposure using GIS, courtesy of a colleague at the University of Southern California.  Part 1 - check!

 I checked several other nearby cooperating centers and found the same result.

Bummer!  It looks like I'm off to the library... just like in middle school.  I wonder if they still have those dusty card catalogs?

I began my online learning journey in January with the best of intentions.  I would study every day and keep up with all of my classes.  My mind would swirl with new ideas and I'd smile with the satisfaction that comes from investing in myself.  I made some great progress by finishing three classes at Cornell, two at UCLA, and the first few weeks of classes at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts.  And then reality interfered...  

When I returned home, I couldn't wait to catch up in all of my classes...until I saw an email from Coursera that I was selected for an interview for a Course Operations Specialist position!  I was giddy with excitement!  Class would have to wait.  

I needed to prepare for the meeting that could lead to my dream job - contributing to educational resources that could benefit countess students.  I soared past the first interview - a rigorous, a one-hour timed task in which I had to critique a sample course proposal for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) from a "real" professor and write a best practices guide for translating traditional courses into MOOCs.  

Rachel, you really need to catch on your classes!  

However, I couldn't skimp on my geo-job search.  I jumped on the networking opportunities provided by attending the L.A. GeoSpatial Summit and presenting at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting and the CalGIS Conference.  April 16th was particularly interesting as I was invited to speak in two cities on the same day.  Miraculously, I was able to present at two events at CalGIS in Long Beach in the morning and then scurry down to San Diego in time to speak at the World Resources SIM Center that night.

Oh yeah...and there was the design and launch of my new magazine - GeoPivot, creating an interactive map of my speaking engagements (see below), and creating a flippable GIS Portfolio to highlight my skills.

Fast forward to today, where I FINALLY have some free time to dive back into my blog.  Stay tuned for more details as I pick up where I left off on my online learning journey.

Isn't it amazing when multiple facets of your life overlap in unexpected ways?  

My favorite class so far is called New Business Development - Pitching the Perfect Presentation.  For the final project, we have to give a polished presentation about a topic we are well versed in.  Each week, we create a small section of the overall talk.  I choose to focus on the future of online education, since I teach online and am in the midst of an experiment in distance education called Adventures in Adult Education.

The homework this week was to find a newspaper article related to our target audience.  With the assignment in mind, I picked up the New York Times as part of my Sunday morning ritual.  Hmm, I wonder if there's anything in here I could use for my project...  Here's what I found on the first page:

I was astonished at how closely his statement matched my recent post - "The Big Idea."  Well Thomas, it looks like you won't have to wait too long to see how this unfolds...

You probably know a Nay Say-er.  No matter what the question or opportunity at hand is, they find a way to say "no" almost immediately.  They use words like "impossible" and shake their head dismissively whenever you share an idea with them.  My optimistic, innovative personality repels this type of person on contact.   

You can imagine my great shock then when Nance, (my teacher of UCLA's Business Development Class) called me out on the first day of class.  "You say NO a lot," she declared.  "No, that's not true," I thought to myself.  "Ugh oh...I just said the dirty word."  Her insightful comment made me realize that my analytical background was popping up in unwelcome ways.   As a database manager, I was forced to organize the messy world into neat boxes.  There were only two answers to every question: yes and no.   

She advised that there is only one correct answer to any question, and it is an enthusiastic "YES."  "How could the answer to any question possibly be YES?," we collectively wondered.  The atmosphere of the class started to feel shifty, uncomfortable, and quiet.  One student asked skeptically, "Are you saying we should lie?"  She continued on about the power of the words "yes" and "no" to influence the outcome of conversations.  She told us that the goal of a conversation is to build a connection, not an opportunity to split hairs about facts.  It's more important that you exude a welcoming aura.  I still wasn't convinced...

We role-played scenarios where another student asked me a question and I had to answer with a "yes," even though my instinctual answer was "no."   A man to my right asked, "So, your work in GIS is about reorganizing IT Infrastructure?"  "I wanted to say, "No, it's really a lot broader than that.  IT is a just one part of the GIS field."  Instead I said, "Yes, GIS is about reorganizing...we give people tools to make decisions in different ways than they are used to.  We try to reorganize the way they think.  We encourage spatial thinking, or the idea that location matters in most decisions."  

OK, I finally get it!  You can say "yes" to any question if you back up and consider the question in a broad sense.  You have to look for nuggets of truth, areas of overlap, or analogies and build on the commonalities in your response.   The extra effort will go a long way to make your listeners feel good about their conversations with you.  

Good bye NO, you have been banished from my vocabulary!!

It's been more than six years since I was a student.  Wow, where did the time go? UCLA's campus is buzzing with activity. I feel creative. I feel alive. There are a few other people lingering in the hallway waiting for class to start. Which ones will be my future friends?  So what am I doing here anyway you ask? You'll have to stay tuned to find out...